Dardick Model 1500 Magazine Fed Revolver

Here is an odd duck gun. The Dardick Model 1500. We had posted an interesting magazine fed Frankenruger revolver the other day. This is nothing like that one. It uses a proprietary polymer cased bullet that is triangular and called Trounds. They are fed into an internal magazine. It is an open chamber design. Very interesting concept.

Co-Founder of KRISSTALK forums, an owner’s support group and all things KRISS Vector related. Nick found his passion through competitive shooting while living in NY. He participates in USPSA and 3Gun. He loves all things that shoots and flashlights. Really really bright flashlights.

I really hope someone revisits the concept in the future. Seems like a neat idea that was just poorly executed.

And now, a .50 Tround Machine gun.

Christopher

If they can get it light enough and lower the redirected the “muzzle flash” away from the shooter that might be a viable replacement for the M2 Browning which the Army has been trying to find for years.

guest

An original idea with the cartridges, but it holds no advantage over revolver machineguns (or cannons), which by the way have achieved much higher rates of fire with conventional ammunition, feed systems, belts etc.
The idea of an open chamber however was invented and tested by germans as far back as ww1 with a gatling style machine-gun that used two part chambers, where one half was located on the barrels and the other on a separate synchronised rotor.
The inherent limitation of this system is rate of fire, as strange as it may sound, because a rotating chamber of any kind will at a certain rate of fire be rotating too fast for a complete firing sequence, in essence the chamber will start unlocking/opening before the chamber pressure is at an acceptably low level. True gatlings suffer from this to a much lesser degree because the chamber is left closed for a longer period of time, and is never “out of sync” with the barrel.

Sulaco

At the end of the 25 and 50 round bursts there is large flashes of power burn seen behind the gun and under. Is this to spec? or a malfunc?

guest

This is common with absolutely all rapid-fire weapons from this design to Gast-type, gatlings etc. The extraction happens so fast that some powder gases escape at the breech which causes this type of event. As long as the unlocking and extraction happens at safe enough chamber pressure to not cause damage to the weapon, this is a nuisance nothing else.

Martin M

The short story is the open chamber design never achieves a tight enough gas seal. It never will, unless you make a more complicated design, which defeats the purpose. Ultimately, it’s a novelty.

Suburban

Well, the open-chamber system allows a higher cyclic rate. However, if
you combine the heat from the solid propellant and bullet friction, with
the higher cyclic rate through a single barrel would just lead to the
barrel overheating and eroding of the rifling that much faster. Perhaps
in a fighter jet shooting short bursts, with nice cool air constantly
flowing around the barrel it would work, but on a tank in an African
desert, probably not so much.

101nomad

For shooting odd ducks.

Edward Franklin

The Dardick is a good example of a firearm designed by someone who knew the engineering to produce a firearm but didn’t have a real firm grasp on the aesthetics or ergonomics to really ‘make’ a firearms. Honestly the basic principle is sound and if packaged into a handgun or rifle that didn’t look so freakish could possibly make a go of it today, it’s certainly more viable than the Gyrojet.

CrankyFool

This may be a pedantic point, but I was watching this and thought to myself “what makes this magazine-fed?” I’d normally think of a magazine-fed weapon as a weapon where you put rounds into the magazine directly, then put the magazine into the weapon — think of your standard M1A, AR15, AK-47, etc. I don’t think, for example, of the Garand as magazine-fed — I think of it as stripper-fed, though obviously it has an internal magazine that holds onto the strippers.

That said, you can look at tubular magazine weapons — e.g. Remington 870, practically all leverguns — as examples of feeding the magazine through the weapon, but we still think of them as magazine-fed.

So what makes this approach magazine-fed and the standard revolver not magazine-fed? Is our technical definition of a magazine a device that holds a bunch of ammo pressed together (whereas the cylinder in a revolver has a chamber for each round)? I’m curious.

Paul Epstein

It’s not complicated- in a revolver, the cylinder is also the chambers for the weapon. A magazine is where the ammunition is stored prior to being chambered, and a normal revolver doesn’t have anything that qualifies because all ammunition is already chambered.

This is magazine fed because there is a magazine which holds the ammunition while it waits to be chambered.

Nicholas C

Think of the M1 Garrand. It has a magazine. It is an internal magazine. It does use a clip to hold the rounds. But the body of the gun, that has the spring follower is considered an internal magazine. The Dardick is the same thing. Due to the design of the dardick, this is not really a revolver. It is more like the rotary engine in my Mazda RX7. You have three operations happening simultaneously. loading the chamber, firing the round, ejecting the round. It is all happening with every turn of the cylinder.

Giolli Joker

“It is more like the rotary engine in my Mazda RX7″
Great parallel, the tround section actually resembles that of the Wankel “piston”…

Graham 1

I think it has something to do with the presence of a spring.

jimmarch

Well…it IS possible to make a swappable tubular magazine…but trust me, the latch system involved is…not easy.

Have GOT to say that loading live rounds for any reason with no barrel etc REALLY makes me cringe. Mr. Murphy loves this kind of thing…Opps in my excitement I loaded it the right way Oh Boom…

101nomad

Will it shoot a silver dollar and and give you four quarters? I saw Tex Ritter do that with an octagon barreled revolver once (no idea how he did that, unless he was as bad at fractions as I am). No, wait, a silver dollar three ways. three 33 and 1/3rd………… never mind. I am not that old, I just have ancestral memories.